Ever wondered what happens when a company decides it wants to start drinking the proprietary champagne instead of the open-source Kool-Aid?
Meet Meraki, makers of the mesh-network hardware behind cool initiatives like FreeTheNet.ca, and until very recently enthusiastic friends of people who wanted to install open-source firmware in their products:
…This could be installed in the commodity Meraki hardware which greeted you with a friendly and encouraging “happy hacking” when you logged into it via the console.
Last week I tried installing our firmware on one of the nodes that I manage and failed 5 times in a row before I gave up. Today I learn that my failure is due to the fact that Meraki has automatically updated the software on all of the units (including legacy, such as ours) so that you cannot install a different firmware on it, at all.
So… in the course of six months Meraki has gone from “happy hacking – buy our equipment and use it to help poor people access the net” to “pay three times as much for our hardware and we’ll install whatever we want on it, whenever we want, and you can’t look under the hood to see what it’s doing or install your own software on it.”
Thanks Meraki.
To date, no response from Meraki on Scott’s post (at least, none that identifies the commenter as a Meraki representative). And Meraki’s blog hasn’t had a post on it since November 2007.
